Today, most American adults can call up some memory of sex ed in their school, whether it was watching corny menstruation movies or seeing their school nurse demonstrate putting a condom on a banana. The movies, in particular, tend to stick in our minds. Screening films at school to teach kids how babies are made has always been a touchy issue, particularly for people who fear such knowledge will steer their children toward sexual behavior. But sex education actually has its roots in moralizing: American sex-ed films emerged from concerns that social morals and the family structure were breaking down.
When the first sex-ed films appeared in 1914, no one wanted to talk about sex, but venereal diseases, like syphilis and gonorrhea, were wreaking so much havoc on the American public, filmmakers took on the burden of educating adults about them. Film proved an ideal instructional medium for topics that made people blush, and over the century, movies were made with a wide range of agendas—to prevent VDs from weakening our military forces, to teach teens how to date, to promote birth control in the developing world, and to ward children away from sexual predators.
After watching more than 500 sex-ed films spanning 100 years, Brenda Goodman produced a documentary this year called “Sex(Ed): The Movie” (not to be confused with the recent raunchy romantic comedy “Sex Ed”) that follows the medium’s trajectory in America through the good, bad, and ridiculous. In the beginning, sex-ed films for teenagers served to reinforce middle-class norms, specifically the belief that sex is only for procreation in the context of a heterosexual marriage. Today, you’d think that we’d have a much more evolved point of view, embracing films that teach youth about safe, healthy, and respectful expression of diverse sexuality. But the most open-minded and detailed classroom sex-ed films were made and screened in the ’70s, and many of those are banned as pornographic now. Even though polls consistently show more than 80 percent of Americans support comprehensive sex education, less than half of all U.S. states require their schools to have sex-ed programs. Many of the films that are shown today focus on advocating chastity and upholding traditional family roles—often eschewing science in the process.